• “Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity”
  danahboyd SXSW talk…”Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows. It’s about being able to understand the social setting in order to behave appropriately. To do so, people must trust their interpretation of the context, including the people in the room and the architecture that defines the setting. When they feel as though control has been taken away from them or when they lack the control they need to do the right thing, they scream privacy foul. “
  (tags: lecture privacy identity danahboyd socialsoftware facebook)

Scholarly Reputation Management Online: The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media
Session 6: Wissenschaftskommunikation 2.0
Social Software @ Work

• Workshop | Social Software @ Work | Düsseldorf, 28. und 29. September 2009
  Upcoming talk: “Michael Habib (Elsevier B.V.) Scholarly Reputation Management Online: The challenges and opportunities of social media”
  (tags: speaker socialsoftware elsevier reputation identity scopus 2collab Dussekdorf)

A little while back Facebook got a lot of slack for refusing to ban some particularly reprehensible hate speech groups. While Facebook’s representative employed the cause of free speech in their defense, many commentators have pointed out that, as a private company, Facebook has complete control of the speech on their site. (I wrote most of this series when this event was still playing out, but chose to take some time before completing it and posting.)  I believe, it is important to take a historical perspective when dealing with issues like this. Luckily, the Supreme Court has something to say on this issue. At least they do if you consider Facebook to share legal characteristics with a shopping mall.

Shopping mall owners have a tendency to go overboard in banning speech they personally disagree with. For example, t-shirts with such slogans as “Give Peace a Chance” have often been considered unacceptable by mall owners.

While a mall is used in roughly the same way as main street used to be, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that as private property the First Amendment doesn’t apply. Facebook too remains private property, which can be easily forgotten as, like a mall atrium, it is increasingly used as a public space. Given this precedent, it stands to reason that Facebook has no legal obligation to allow hate speech.

However, is it desirable that Facebook take it upon themselves to censor hateful viewpoints such as those in question? As the central online community space for a whole generation at least 2.5 generations, one could argue that it would be more desirable for Facebook to install their own First Amendment.

Why? This makes Facebook less likely to abuse their power to ban whatever they feel like. A lot of legitimate activism takes part on and through Facebook, including a lot of political activity. If Facebook is to remain a platform for such activity, a freedom of speech policy is critical.

For example, Facebook technically could have banned all speech favorable of the Obama campaign leading up to the recent election. Cries of censorship wouldn’t matter from a legal perspective. However, given Obama’s popularity on Facebook, such an action could have skewed the results in favor of McCain

It could be argued that, like for public spaces, the best safeguard against abuse of power in a public-like space like Facebook is an absolutist policy on freedom of speech.

Specifically because there are no legal First Amendment protections inside Facebook, this question becomes more urgent. This is not a question the courts can answer for us.   It is a question we need to answer for ourselves.  Whatever paths Facebook and the other big social networks choose now will set the precedents for later.

In this series of posts, I will argue that online communities share more in common with universities, libraries, and newspapers than they do with shopping malls.

• On the Nature of Networking — #3 – The Scientist – Richard Grant’s blog on Nature Network
  More discussion on Cameron Neylon’s open letter.
  (tags: sciencenetwork science2.0)

Faceted Friending is a term that I have started using to describe what I see as one of the next major stages of how tagging will improve social software. In his recent post titled Sharing and Following/Listening in the Social Web, Thomas Vander Wal discusses how networks are beginning to allow users a deeper level of granularity into how their defined relationships effect their sharing. For example, the Family, Friends, and All distinction in Flickr is built into how information is shared. Thomas’ post highlights some of the top level distinctions that people are making along these lines. While many of the following points will overlap with what Thomas is writing about, I believe that I offer a different perspective on many of the same issues.

One example he uses is “Geo Listening and Sharing”. Basically this includes sharing and listening to people in your geographic vicinity. I had the pleasure of working with Thomas on a mini interactionary at DCampSouth. There we were broadly tackling how to improve status updates and Facebook feeds. One of the ideas we came up with was to allow sharing within a geographic area.

The concept of faceted friending is being employed elsewhere on the web as well. The subscription function in del.icio.us is another popular example. I don’t necessarily want to subscribe to my contacts bookmarks about cats and local politics, but I might want to subscribe to their bookmarks on folksonomy and tagging. In fact, with resource sharing applications like del.icio.us, the utility is highly diluted when employed as a straight network. This is why at BiblioCommons, tagging and subject headings are the bonds that hold the network together. Rarely do I care about all of the topics that a person is reading up on, but I often am interested in one unique facet of our shared interests.

This is also important in more social instances. This became particularly noticeable to me when Facebook opened up to the world. Before, I primarily used Facebook to interact with local friends, friends from college, etc. All of a sudden half of my Facebook friends were librarians. While they are librarians who I consider friends, they don’t necessarily need to know my local happy hour plans and I don’t necessarily need to know about stuff they are doing outside of our shared participation in the library world. This background is how the idea of being able to focus status updates by shared personal facets or geography entered my mind when working on the design challenge with Thomas at DCamp.

One of the tricks to employing Faceted Friending is to make the process simple enough that users take advantage of it. That is why our group decided to minimize the facets that could be attached to a status update to those that would be most useful to that feature. Given that students often use it to share their whereabouts, the geographic importance of status came through as a major facet. The difference between core friends and acquaintances came through as a second, which lead us to the concept of a VIP status update that is only sent out to a core group of friends.

A second way to get people to take advantage of faceted friending is to automate the process as much as possible. So for example, when I add someone as a del.icio.us contact, the system could compare our tags, offer up the most common shared tags, and then offer that I pick tags to follow. Again, BiblioCommons is doing this very well and a lot of my belief in this concept comes from my time with them.

Another example of automating this process is through automatically determining geographical information. In the Facebook status updates example, Facebook could determine a users whereabouts by IP address and share their location oriented status updates with friends in that vicinity. Of course GPS can be used similarly.

A third way to simply the process of faceted friending is through embracing and developing open standards that can allow people to maintain categories of friends across social networks. Beginnings of this can be accomplished through adoption of creative uses for microformats such as XFN. This is a topic Chris Messina brought up at last years BarCampRDU that has been gaining increasing traction lately.

I hope to host a session on Faceted Friending at tomorrow’s BarCampRDU. Unfortunately, I will miss the morning sessions, but will pitch the idea for the afternoon.

I plan on writing a lot more about this topic, but was just trying to get a preliminary sketch of my ideas out there. I will be writing more on faceted tagging as well. Ultimately, I see the intersection of faceted tagging and faceted friending as fueling the next generation of social software.

• user-interface – Microformats – Social Network Portability
  Section on useing XFN, hCard, etc. to create a portable social network. I wrote about this idea over a year ago after a discussion we had at BarCampRDU 2006.
  (tags: barcamp barcamprdu microformats xfn openid social_networks SocialSoftware)
• VuFind: Home
  “July 18, 2007 – Villanova University announces VuFind, a next generation library catalog, is now freely available as Open Source software.” Looks very cool. I need to spend more time with it though. Update: I just checked out the demo. This is really nice. It employs excellent faceted search with a clean interface and incorporates first stages of some social tools.(tags: opensource OPAC library2.0 faceted facets)
• Notes from BarCampRdu,Part 3, Social networking, Social browsing, and Microformats at LIS :: Michael Habib
  
  
  The earlier post discussing portable social networks. (Second half of the post) Two equations were discussed:
  XFN + OpenID = portable network
  XFN + hCard + Jabber + OpenID = ad hoc (open standards) social networks(tags: openid microformats socialnetworking social_networks SocialSoftware barcamp barcamprdu)

• Facebook Sees Flood of New Traffic from Teenagers and Adults

  The coMscore press release on Facebook’s massive growth in use among non-college age users.

  (tags: facebook statistics SocialSoftware)

• Faceted Folksonomy | davidsturtz.com

  via johnfudrow — Post on Faceted Folksonomy. This is one of my favorite topics as of late. Expect to hear a lot about this in the near future. Basically it is a concept for collecting richer user contributed metadata.

  (tags: metadata folksonomy tagging faceted)

• InfoSpaces » Blog Archive » The Evolution of Social Tagging

  More on faceted tagging.

  (tags: folksonomy tagging metadata faceted facets)

• FaceTag: Integrating Bottom-up and Top-down Classification in a Social Tagging System — ASIST Bulletin June/July 2007

  From the ASIST Bulletin, this article appears to describe the need for faceted tagging and how FaceTag is attacking the problem.

  (tags: toread facetag faceted facets tagging folksonomy EmanueleQuintarelli)

• FaceTag: Integrating bottom-up and top-down classification in a social tagging system

  “FaceTag is a working prototype of a semantic collaborative tagging tool conceived for bookmarking information architecture resources. It aims to show how the flat keywords space of user-generated tags can be effectively mixed with a richer faceted classi

  (tags: toread faceted facets folksonomy tagging)

• Folksonomies: power to the people (Paper presented ISKO Italy-UniMIB meeting : Milan : June 24, 2005)

  via John Furdrow — Seems more general than the same author’s works on faceted tagging, but seems like it would be a helpful into to his line of thinking.

  (tags: EmanueleQuintarelli toread faceted facets tagging folksonomy Folksonomies)

• citation-formats – Microformats

  “This page will display several different types of citation format types.” In depth comparison of Dublin Core, MODS, bibTeX and Z39.80

  (tags: wiki microformats hcite citation citations bibtext)

• tiara.org » Online Identity Bibliography

  “A collection of academic papers and books about identity online and online identity.”

  (tags: identity20 identity bibliography research psychology)

• tiara.org » status in social media

  “I finally got a glimmer of a dissertation idea today: status in social media.” – Includes a nice discussion of status in Web 2.0 geek culture.

  (tags: culture SocialSoftware status)

• The Real Paul Jones » Blog Archive » OCLC NextSpace virtual roundtable – Q1

  Paul is blogging his answers to the questions being given to panel participants. The topic of the virtual roundtable is online communities. Other panel members include Fred Stutzman, Lori Bell, and Ed Castronova.

  (tags: oclc virtualcommunities)

Social Networking: Five Sites You Need to Know by Fred Stutzman (PhD student and Facebook researcher).

Ok – so that’s my list – let’s put it in context. As social networking becomes normal, a number of interesting trends emerge – trends that will have lasting implications for designers of social-enabled tools. Here’s a handy bulleted list

Anyone interested in the future of social networking should check this post out. As you can see he not only talks about five up and coming sites, but also gives an excellent overview of current trends in social networking software. One of my favorites, 43 Things, didn’t make the cut, but he does link to it in the trends section. You can view a copy of my report on 43 Things here. What do these trends mean for Library 2.0?